Accessory Animation and Spring Effects

When a character has accessories attached to it, the animations of the accessories can be included in the MotionPlus file as well. In addition to that, the spring states on the character's extended bones or the accessories can also be stored in the MotionPlus format so that you can easily re-use the file to any standard or non-standard characters.

Exchanging Body Motions, Animated Accessories and the Spring States

  1. In iClone, apply a character.
  2. Attach a bone-skinned accessory to the character.
    Please note that in this case, the bones of the accessory have been given a Spring Effect in advance via 3DXchange.

    This accessory is a bone-skinned one and the bones are applied with spring effects.

  3. Apply motions to the character. Since the extended bones of the character are applied with Spring Effects, these bones (in this case, the tail and the ears) bounce automatically.
  4. Because the accessory has spring effects, it bounces through the ground, which is far from ideal.
  5. In the Modify panel, turn off the Spring Effect of the accessory under its Attribute tab.
  6. Switch to the Animation tab and click the Edit Animation Layer button. Adjust the accessory by transforming its bones.
  7. Turn on the Spring Effect at a certain time so the accessory starts to stretch and bounce again along with the movements of the character.
  8. Open the Collect Clip track of the character and make a range.
  9. Right click within the range and select the Add MotionPlus to Library from the menu.
  10. Activate the Motion, Accessory Data >> Animation and Spring State boxes. Click the OK button to save these items into one single MotionPlus file.
  11. Apply other characters with the same accessory attached into iClone. This character can either be in this or another new project.
  12. Drag and drop the saved MotionPlus file onto the new characters.
  13. Now you can see all of the animations together, including the accessory animations and spring states.

    Note:

    • iClone compares the structures of the character to the MotionPlus, if it finds that the accessories are missing, then it only applies the character's motions and ignores the accessory data included in the MotionPlus.
    • Two factors must be satisfied in order to extract the accessory data from the MotionPlus for applying to the accessory: Identical accessory name and identical parent node.
    • Because iClone auto-renames objects of same name with a numeric suffix, such as XXX(0), when you apply a MotionPlus that includes accessory data, make sure the target character's accessory name is manually changed to a same one in order to apply the accessory animations successfully.
    • Only the Look At and Path of an accessory can be baked and flattened into the MotionPlus file. In addition, the path and the accessory must be attached to the same node of a character to ensure an accurate animation result.
    • The Spring effect is determined and triggered by the spring states (on or off) and MotionPlus thus only includes the state keys instead of baking the spring effect to it.